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Canadian historian Carl Berger passed away in Toronto on Oct. 1 at the age of 87.Newsome Photography/Supplied
Sometimes a nation’s story gets shaken in such a way as to make its teeth rattle. University of Toronto historian Carl Clinton Berger did just that in 1970. He turned the study of Canada’s past topsy-turvy with his book The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867-1914. His book, as ordinary Canadians and academics came to see, was not really about Canadians’ attachment to imperialism. It was a masterful introduction to Canadian intellectual history, to the history of ideas and how they develop, spread and transform across time.
The book brought Prof. Berger to the finding that what he was really looking at was not an English-Canadian notion of imperialism but an English-Canadian notion of nationalism. And as historians Douglas Owram and Gerald Friesen wrote in the introduction to Thinkers and Dreamers, their 2011 collection of essays honouring Prof. Berger’s work, The Sense of Power had a huge impact on how Canadian history was thought about, put into words and taught.
The principles of intellectual history, Prof. Berger declared, did not exist in a vacuum; they needed to be understood within the context of their specific political, social, cultural and material environments. And as he laid bare these layers of intellectual history, Prof. Berger revealed that what he was looking at was not really imperialist thought with a maple sugar coating – it was Canadian nationalism.
His approach combined a narrative presentation of history – stories about what people said and thought about their country – with the body of literature dealing with technical historical matters, including techniques, theories and principles of historical research as well as the critical examination of material from primary and secondary sources subject to scholarly criteria.
The dust jacket of Prof. Berger’s book showed a two-cent Canadian stamp from Christmas 1898 (Prof. Berger was a serious stamp-collector), bearing a map of the globe with countries belonging to the then-British Empire coloured red. A big, red blob of Canada was shown at the map’s centre, with the inference that Canada would be a dominant partner in a reorganized British Empire. But really, what the story of the stamp reveals was Prof. Berger’s argument that allusions to imperialism were a form of Canadian nationalism taking place in the country’s intellectual discourse between the seminal dates of Confederation in 1867 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
Prof. Owram and Prof. Friesen wrote in their introduction to Thinkers and Dreamers that whereas earlier work on political history in Canada was primarily limited to depictions of the ideas of politicians, the opinions of journalists and sometimes references to historiography (the study of how history is written and recorded by historians over time), Prof. Berger probed the thinking and utterances of a much broader swath of Canadians. He examined and recorded myths and legends that Canadians had about their country and looked into their origins. He used textual analysis and archival research to figure out what past writers and speakers actually meant to do with their words rather than judging them in the context of modern settings.
In his revisionist interpretation of what was largely considered to be a Canada glued to imperialist thinking, he assembled his findings into what Prof. Owram and Prof. Friesen wrote of as a lucidly constructed, carefully documented and stylishly written argument to the contrary.
It was the groundbreaking academic path he took for the rest of his career – nearly 40 years at University of Toronto – and on which he led others.
He followed The Sense of Power with his 1976 book The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing, 1900-1970, the first in-depth study of Canadian historiography, which garnered critical praise and won the Governor-General’s Award for non-fiction. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
The two books together were unified by a similar preoccupation – the identity of Canada as revealed by its history – and together they examined the pronounced shift of thinking in Canada from British North American to North American, from one century to the next, and were described by academic historians as all that students of history needed to know about the political mechanics and intellectual imagery of how Canada worked.
Prof. Berger died in Toronto on Oct. 1 at the age of 87.
He was born on Feb. 25, 1939, in The Pas, Man., the son of a millworker. He did his undergraduate degree at the University of Manitoba where he proved to be a brilliant student, graduating with the university’s gold medal. He then went to University of Toronto to do a master’s degree in 1961 on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and, after obtaining his master’s degree, began a doctorate under the supervision of J.M.S. Careless, one of English Canada’s leading historians.
Carl Berger’s appearance at U of T as a graduate student and his appointment to its history department coincided with the rapid expansion of advanced Canadian historical studies – a heretofore neglected academic discipline – centred in Canada on work being done at U of T. And Prof. Berger’s chosen specialty, the Victorian period in Canada, alongside the framework for study he had built for his early writings, were among the major factors drawing students to the U of T’s program.
Prof. Berger had a tremendous ability to use the study of very specific, often quiet, elite organizations to paint a larger picture of what was being said and thought about in the country. This was not an easy task, as Prof. Owram and Prof. Friesen wrote.
Much intellectual history work foundered like snuffed candles because the chosen groups or organizations for academics to study did not illuminate larger responses. Prof. Berger’s work did not founder; it wasn’t snuffed. Both The Sense of Power and The Writing of Canadian History wrestle successfully with the way in which private groups tried to understand Canada.
“All written history is in a sense a form of autobiography and an essay of self-knowledge,” Prof. Berger once wrote.
Prof. Berger was a modest, private man who could also be wickedly funny. His approach to historical writing was founded on a deep sense of irony. (His close friend, the celebrated late York University historian Ramsay Cook, titled his essay on Prof. Berger for the Owram-Friesen book, Carl Berger: Ironic Man as Historian, and noted that in much of Prof. Berger’s written work, irony dripped from every page.)
Prof. Berger’s essay “The True North Strong and Free” in political scientist Peter Russell’s 1966 collection Nationalism in Canada begins with some truly outrageous purple poetry (“Hail! Rugged monarch, Northern Winter, hail!”) by William Henry Taylor.
The essay illustrates some of the appalling beliefs that many leaders of Anglo-Saxon Canadian society once held, weaving together racism and nationalism. The following passage, for example, looks at the writing of Upper Canada College headmaster George Parkin (1846-1922).
“[Parkin] asserted, we may attribute to the Anglo-Saxon race a unique aptitude for self-government. The special importance of the Canadian climate, therefore, was not merely that it sustained the hardy character of the stronger races, but that it also constituted, in Darwinian terms, ‘a persistent process of natural selection.’”
The essay, it needs to be pointed out, was referring to Canadian attitudes of the previous century and not to Prof. Berger’s own views (a perfect example of the mechanics of intellectual history referring to attitudes of the past often being starkly different from beliefs of the present).
“If Canadian nationalism is to be understood,” Prof. Berger wrote, “its meaning must be sought and appreciated in myths, legend and symbols.” And setting down his thoughts on the differences between French-Canadian and English-Canadian intellectuals, he wrote: “For both the French-Canadian nationalists and the English-Canadian imperialists, history had ordained a special avocation and nationalism was consecrated by the hand of God.”
Prof. Berger leaves his wife, Laurel Sefton MacDowell; his younger sister, Eileen; his daughters, Rachel Berger and Clare Barnett; stepchildren, Jen MacDowell and Lawrence MacDowell; five grandchildren and two stepgrandchildren.
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